DAILY* FRESH INK EST. 2026 · NYC

natmc.

The Daily Wire · Monday, September 14, 2026 · New York

What Nathaniel McNamara is building, writing, and reading. Dealyo, Smarty Pants, angel investing, tech and markets. Updated daily, give or take a coffee.

Monday, September 14, 2026 1 item
NEW X DEBRIEF

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 - 8 posts · tagged: #instinct #muse #ai #chatgpt

THIRTY THINGS GOING ON IN INSTINCT

At 11:50am I replied to Matt PRD that I was going to try his Muse personal-style workflow. His post offered a prompt that analyzes Instagram photos, defines an upgrade style, researches products at three price tiers, and builds an interactive report. I wrote: "Have about 30 things going on Instinct and trying to figure out easy way to replicate or test the platforms against each other" (x.com).

The comparison got more specific late at night. At 11:39pm I posted four screenshots and wrote, "I am fan of the emojis from Instinct" (x.com). Eleven minutes later I asked whether anyone else hates when ChatGPT does work in presentation mode and wishes it defaulted to the image model (x.com). The screenshot showed my instruction: "gross - do it using your image model - you are so much better than what you just shared."

Also Monday: I posted that the stock market was pacing the frontier (x.com), shared a Disney World ticket comparison - $3.50 in 1971 and $189 in 2026 - with "This 7.5% annual inflation. Damn" (x.com), gave Brunson and the Knicks a basic-blocking-and-tackling note (x.com), joked there would be no meaningful AI news this week (x.com), and traced comedy timing from laugh tracks to Vine to 24-hour streamathons (x.com).

Sunday, September 13, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 - 6 posts · tagged: #instinct #dns #ai

COPY, PASTE, AND WAIT FOR IT TO BE DONE

At 8:43pm I named one of my favorite jobs to hand Instinct: setting up DNS on GoDaddy or elsewhere. "Its a simple task that I find annoying to do. I prefer copy, paste, and wait for it to be done" (x.com). The post was concrete about the division of labor. I provide the setup instructions. The agent handles the repetitive configuration. I wait for the finished result.

At noon I posted a way to spot where adoption is sticking: "follow the tokens." I pointed to background workflows running while people sleep, rather than chat boxes queried occasionally (x.com). The DNS job is the smaller example of that same behavior: hand off a bounded task and let it run.

The rest of Sunday stayed brief. At 6:06am I asked, "Are the prisoners cooperating or is there an actual dilemma?" (x.com). At 6pm I wrote that you pursue opportunities when expected value is small but possible, then push hard when they work (x.com). At 7:25pm: "is it productivity or ADHD?" (x.com). Three minutes later, I contrasted AI leaders calling for slower development with Trump saying no (x.com).

Saturday, September 12, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 - 5 posts · tagged: #agents #cfoai #tesla

DIRECTIONS FOR AI AGENTS, LINKED FROM THE HOME PAGE

At 11:52am I called out one thing I like about blader's cfo.ai (re)launch: "they have directions for AI Agents linked to from their home page" (x.com). His launch post says runway is now cfo.ai, that you can hire @arithecfo and he can start today, and that you can test-drive him by replying to the thread with anything ridiculous you want modeled - he comes back in 30 minutes or less with a fully wired financial model. My take: "I do think the Agent Led Sales will be a big thing going forward. Lean in today."

At 7pm I posted the general version: "When an agent hits a wall, asks for permission to buy access, and keeps going, that is owning the outcome. The app layer will belong to systems of execution that actually close the loop" (x.com).

In between, Tesla posted "Go for launch" - a taillight photo stamped 10.01 - and Jason Baptiste quote-posted it: "Finally. It's time." Me: "Holy sh*t!" (x.com). Jason offered: "I will take you for a ride." My question: "Founder edition?!" (x.com).

Friday, September 11, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 - 10 posts · tagged: #911 #instinct #unclaimedproperty

I NEVER KNOW WHAT TO WRITE ON 9/11

At 2:53pm, four posts told my September 11 story. I was leaving the 2/3 train at Wall Street a moment after the first plane hit and saw a stream of people running down the stairs (x.com).

I was in my office when the second plane hit and watched the towers smoking from the office balcony - the closed balcony window was the luck, because when the towers fell the windows blacked out completely (x.com). Papers and debris from the fallen buildings ended up on that balcony.

I waited until 1pm for the air to clear, then walked north through the soot past armed guards in gas masks (x.com). I watched the news at my father's apartment in the East 50s, got home at 9pm once the subways ran again, and kept watching until 3am (x.com).

Also: my AI assistant searched all 50 state unclaimed-property databases and found 9 records worth about $400 - a GEICO refund, a Chase account from Mountain View, a Columbia credit from Seattle. "Claims filed in 15 minutes" (x.com). Asked whether it used missingmoney.com, I posted the assistant's answer: the site is bot-walled, so it went straight to the state databases (x.com). Can it view county government records? "Not sure" (x.com).

I also asked how to update Codex to get the Astra model (x.com), asked @Bfaviero which side he is on now that mathematics Polymarkets have gone parabolic (x.com), and nudged the September 15 Instinct meetup: "If interested in Instinct pls join" (x.com).

Thursday, September 10, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 - 5 posts · tagged: #smartypants #instinct

I WILL PAY YOU UP TO $30/MO TO USE YOUR COMPUTER

At 10:37pm, I made the offer directly in a four-post thread: "I will pay you up to $30/mo to use your computer when it's idle." Smarty Pants is recruiting a small group of Mac owners for an invite-only alpha, with a waitlist at smartypants.network (x.com).

The idea: most computers spend a lot of time sitting idle, and Smarty Pants uses that spare capacity to run AI models when the owner is not using the machine. "You stay in control, and you get paid for the compute you provide" (x.com).

The alpha starts with Apple Silicon Macs, which have the fast chips and shared memory to run capable AI models locally; the test is which Macs work best, how much useful work they can do, and how reliably (x.com). "This is very early" - the small group runs the software, shares feedback, and helps the team understand what works and what doesn't (x.com).

Earlier, at 1:24pm, I announced the first NYC Instinct meetup: Tuesday September 15, 6-9pm at Linen Hall. "My Instinct organized the whole thing: found the bar, negotiated the contract, handled the RSVPs" (x.com).

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 - 14 posts · tagged: #apple #appleevent

CHRISTMAS MORNING, TEN YEARS LATER

At 12:05pm, before Apple took the stage, the event still felt like “xmas morning”: a new Santa, new presents, and prices that would hurt (x.com).

By 1:38pm, the presentation had reached a familiar part of the program. A post from March 2016 called Apple product updates useful for tracking “50 year old male fashion.” Ten years later, it still fit well enough to repost with four words: “This still holds true.” (x.com)

Eight minutes later came one feature with an immediate use. Apple’s “live rewind” could settle debates with Tiffany over what was actually said on TV. (x.com)

The rest of the presentation produced a practical checklist: health features worth understanding, a battery claim that did not seem to add up, and a product demo that apparently required a hand model with an unusually long thumb.

Tuesday, September 8, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 - 5 posts · tagged: #ai #openai

MAKE THE HEADLINE FIT THE THEOREM

Sam Altman described it as a Navier-Stokes result produced by 10,000 agents working for 88 hours on a GPU cluster.

The result was narrower. The system formalized one blowup case in Lean under controlled external forcing, building on work by Buckmaster, Alpöge, Córdoba, Elgindi and others.

That is still a serious engineering result. But "AI solved Navier-Stokes" gives the system credit for the mathematical idea, rather than for translating and checking an existing argument.

The correction ended up as a Dr. Seuss poem because the plain version sounded angrier than intended (x.com). The last line kept the point intact: "Make the headline fit the theorem - not the price of the stock."

Monday, September 7, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 - 8 posts · tagged: #instinct #nyc

ONE REPLY AT A TIME

Three people got invited to next week's Instinct meetup on Monday. None came from an announcement post.

At 10:12am, Sarah Cone and Noah Shinn got an invitation inside a conversation already underway, plus a request to pass it to other people who might be interested (x.com).

At 10:32pm, Sasha Kaletsky posted an Instinct use case. The reply started with the use case, then added: "btw, you may find it interesting to join this event." (x.com)

At 12:40am, Zain got the same kind of invitation in another reply (x.com).

The meetup is being assembled through individual conversations. Monday added three more people to that list.

Sunday, September 6, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 - 5 posts · tagged: #ai #agents #instinct

THE VERB CHANGES HANDS

A quiet holiday Sunday produced the week's shortest thesis. Mid-afternoon, in one line: we are moving from software that helps us know what to do to software that actually helps us do it - sources, then answers, then outcomes (x.com). Just after midnight came the working proof, offered as casually as a shrug: using an agent more and more to say "pls do this.." - and often it can (x.com).

The progression is worth memorizing because each step hands over more of the verb. Sources: the machine finds, you read. Answers: the machine decides what the finding means, you choose. Outcomes: the machine does the thing, and you find out after. Nine words - sources, answers, outcomes - and each one moves the human one seat further from the controls. The midnight reply is what the third step feels like from inside: not a demo, not a roadmap, just a person saying please and being surprised, still, that it works.

The counterweight arrived an hour before that reply, as a joke. A video bit about a Cybercab driving a passenger straight to jail because the onboard model found a warrant, and the response: I know it is a joke, for now, but it does not seem far fetched (x.com). The parenthetical is the whole column. For now. When software only knows things, its mistakes are wrong answers. When software does things, its mistakes have doors and wheels. The distance between "pls do this" and "drove me straight to jail" is not intelligence. It is permission - and permission is the part nobody has written the manual for. If the progression holds, the next version of that manual gets written by whoever learns to say please carefully.

Saturday, September 5, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 - 12 posts · tagged: #robotaxi #tesla #ai

THE PRICE REDRAWS THE MAP

Forty quiet minutes on a Saturday held the week's real story. First the design detail: about 85 to 90 percent of taxi and ride-hail trips carry one or two people, which is why the Cybercab has two seats, with Model Ys in the fleet for larger parties (x.com). Then the arithmetic: at the stated target of 30 to 40 cents a mile, Tribeca to East Hampton comes to roughly $35 to $45 in a Cybercab - and the closing thought that there may be a lot more gold in the Hamptons next summer (x.com). The launch event was Thursday's headline. Saturday was about what the headline costs.

Sit with the number. Forty dollars for a hundred miles is not a cheaper taxi. It is a different map. And notice the progression, because each step is a genuine change, not a restatement. Most trips are two people, so the car is built for two. Built for two, it costs 30 to 40 cents a mile. At 40 cents a mile, a hundred-mile trip costs less than the parking. The design follows the median trip, the price follows the design, and geography follows the price.

The day's counterweight was a one-line joke: when I ask AI if this project will really take six to twelve weeks (x.com). The punchline was left hanging, and it did not need to land. Six to twelve weeks is a quote from the old cost curve, the same curve that priced a ride to the Hamptons at three figures. Both numbers - the fare and the timeline - were set when the work was done by people, and both are being renegotiated at once. If the new prices hold, distance stops being the moat around places like the Hamptons. The gold there next summer is not the beach. It is the repricing.

Friday, September 4, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 - 18 posts · tagged: #ai #agents #commerce

WHEN SOFTWARE BECOMES A CUSTOMER

Two things happened within three hours on Friday afternoon. First, a field report: an agent hit a limit on a lead scraper, found the paid tier, and asked to open an account with a credit card (x.com). Then, reading what season three of a Netflix show cost, the prediction that someone would fire up a video model over the weekend and try to make it for one-hundredth the price (x.com). Neither is a headline. Together they mark one change: the software stopped only doing the work and started taking part in the market.

Sit with the number. A hundredth is not a discount; it is a different economy. When the cost of making something falls a hundredfold, the budget stops being the barrier, and the scarce thing becomes the judgment to know what is worth making. And sit with the progression in the field report. The agent hit a limit. It found the paid tier. It asked for the card. Each step is small. Together they are the difference between a tool and a customer - software that notices a price, decides it is worth paying, and reaches for the wallet.

The tension is that the public argument is still stuck on the old question. The same afternoon brought a sarcastic jab at the latest study: so AI creates jobs? (x.com). Count the jobs created, count the jobs taken - the scoreboard argument assumes the players are still people and companies. But the afternoon's evidence says the players are changing. Agents now hold cards, pick tiers, and bid against studios. The question is not whether AI creates jobs. It is what a market does when the newest customers are not human. If this continues, prices will start clearing between machines, and the next negotiation will not involve a person at all.

Thursday, September 3, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 - 17 posts · tagged: #ai #openai #regulation

THE CURVE AND THE CEILING

Thursday was marked on the calendar in real time: OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, Tesla launched the CyberCab, and the note went up calling it an important day (x.com). But the louder signal was not any single launch. It was the slope underneath. OpenRouter processed 4.6 trillion tokens a week last September. Today it processes 114 trillion. That is 25x in twelve months - a vertical wall, not a plateau (x.com).

The slope has a shape anyone can recite now. Last September the models answered questions. By December they reasoned through problems. By March they used your computer. By June they worked for hours on their own. This September they run teams of agents in parallel (x.com). Five rungs in twelve months, each one a category of work that did not exist the season before.

And on the same day, a bill arrived in the Senate to permanently ban any AI that surpasses human intelligence, with twenty years in prison for violators. The reply: I have bad news for you Bernie (x.com). A ban is written against a snapshot. The thing it names will be twenty-five times bigger by the time the ink dries. You can legislate against a version. You cannot legislate against a curve. The only question left is what gets built on the way through it.

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 - 28 posts · tagged: #ai #agents #instinct

THE TIE AT THE TOP

The day opened on the model race: the SOTA models are so neck and neck that it is surprising none has pulled ahead (x.com). By afternoon the point had sharpened. Gemini 3.8 Flash is basically frontier-class on a surprising number of tasks at a fraction of the price (x.com). The answer to a direct question about Kimi drew the same map: all the models are competing fiercely, there is no clear winner, and specialization and price will decide it (x.com). The race at the top has ended in a tie.

A tie at the model layer moves the value to the work layer. The midday thesis: the biggest shift in AI is from charging for software to charging for outcomes, and replacing $30-a-seat workflow tools with systems that directly execute the transaction is where the trillion-dollar companies get built (x.com). The rest of the day read like evidence. Aslan AI raised $20.8M to run undercover agents in criminal forums for the FBI (x.com). fal cut the price of video generation again (x.com). One 12-person company is spending $2,000 to $4,000 a month on an SMS assistant just to automate basic ops (x.com). And the working proof: an agent planned a meetup end to end - emailed eight NYC venues, caught its own bounced emails, fielded the replies, priced three private rooms, and locked a back room at Linen Hall for September 15. The first NYC Instinct event is on the calendar and the RSVP is open (x.com). One reply added the missing word to the outcomes thesis: speed (x.com).

The last post of the night put a ceiling on the whole picture: 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenue comes from 1% of customers (x.com). The easy read is that the labs are capped. The better one is to imagine the other 99% growing into how the pioneers already use these tools. The lesson of the day: the scoreboard is a tie, so stop watching it. Count what ships.

Tuesday, September 1, 2026 1 item
X DEBRIEF

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 - 7 posts · tagged: #ai #poker #knicks #agents

WHEN +EV ISN'T THE WHOLE QUESTION

September's AI release calendar, laid out in one quoted list - Fable 5.1, GPT 6 Astra, Grok 4.7, DeepSeek V5, Gemini 3.8 flash and more inside a single month - drew the day's first reaction: spelled out like that, the pace of change is remarkable (x.com). Hours later Every's week-long Fable 5.1 test landed - "the strongest coding model we've used" - and got a repost plus a short verdict: "This review makes me want to use Fable 5.1. Check it out." (x.com).

The day's most engaged post was a poker hand. Sixteen players left, A8s in early position with ten big blinds and the blinds about to jump - shove, button shows queens, out after three days of grinding. The question isn't the shove's chip EV, which was probably fine; it's whether a decision can be right in isolation and wrong once you weigh what happens if it goes badly - startups included (x.com). One reply pushed back directly: "pretty clearly the right call" (x.com).

Elsewhere: a webhook that returned HTTP 200 while a Postgres worker silently dropped the payload over an unescaped unicode character in a property address - "My grandmother would think I am speaking a foreign language" (x.com). An inbox agent that finds unopened newsletters, adds checkboxes, and unsubscribes on command: "works like a charm!" (x.com). A clear-grape Gatorade review from a glass-bottle lifer who wanted to hate it and kinda digs it (x.com). And a note that Jalen Brunson turned 30 - if he gets another ring, "they better just give him the statue" (x.com).

Monday, August 31, 2026 5 items
X DEBRIEF

MONDAY, AUGUST 31 - 2 posts · tagged: #venture-capital #agents

THE COST OF SELLING TOO EARLY

Doug Leone's admission is the kind of number venture capital usually keeps quiet: Sequoia owned 10% of Google, 20% of Nvidia, and early Apple, and sold all of them. The post frames it with Fred Wilson's long-running argument that fund structures force firms to sell their best assets too early. Treating software like a 10-year fund cycle instead of a multi-decade compounding machine left hundreds of billions on the table. The structure, not the picking, was the mistake.

The late post is a public experiment log: an agent handed an open-ended errand - find 5-15 bars near Union Square and Flatiron, dig up private-events contacts, organize a 20-40 person meetup with a cash bar and private room on a $250-300 minimum spend, pick an open Tuesday in mid-September, then stand up a Luma invite and find places to submit it (link). Results promised in the morning. The instruction set reads like a brief to a competent assistant, which is exactly the capability on trial.

Sunday, August 30, 2026 3 items
X DEBRIEF

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30 - 4 posts · tagged: #ai #knicks #nyc-eats #agents

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE WAIT GOES AWAY

Two of Sunday's posts circle the same question. Taalas is generating roughly 14,000 tokens per second, about 100x ChatGPT's pace, and the post quoting the demo asks the follow-up: what happens when waiting goes away? The evening's first post answers it in advance: demand for intelligence grows 50x in the next few years. If both hold, faster supply doesn't relieve demand - it creates it.

The rest of the day: Kevin Durant spent the summer publicly crediting the Knicks' Finals comeback with breaking his brain, an unusual amount of praise from that corner. And a documented home attempt at L'Artusi's mushroom dish, rated pretty good.

BUILDING

Dealyo

Transaction coordination for real estate agents. Live in Texas - Houston first, then DFW, Austin, San Antonio.

BUILDING

Smarty Pants

A distributed AI inference network on idle Apple Silicon. The electricity grid for intelligence.

THE MAN

Nathaniel McNamara builds companies.

Right now: Dealyo (transaction coordination for real estate agents, live in Texas) and Smarty Pants (distributed AI inference on idle Apple Silicon). He angel invests, publishes four newsletters, and reads more than is strictly necessary.

Everything here is either public already or cleared by him first.